Tallie’s marital career had been a checkered one, not surprisingly in the world she lived in, where unstable relationships and quick turnover were the norm. She always said that it was impossible to meet normal, decent guys in the film industry. Max’s father had been another story entirely. He was a cowboy from Montana she’d met at USC, and she’d gotten pregnant at twenty. She had dropped out of school for a year to have the baby, and her father had insisted they get married. They were both barely more than kids themselves, and by the time Max was six months old, her father had gone back to Montana, and they got divorced. Tallie had gone to see him a few times, to see if they could maintain the relationship, but their lives were totally different. Since then, he’d been on the rodeo circuit for twenty years, married a girl from Wyoming, and had three other kids. He sent Max a birthday card every year, a souvenir from the rodeo for Christmas, and Max had seen him four times in her life. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just had no connection to Max, and came from another world. He’d been a handsome boy, stunningly so at twenty, and Max was even more beautiful than her mother, a six-foot-tall blonde, long and lanky with sky blue eyes. Tallie’s eyes were green, and she was slightly shorter than her daughter. When they went out together, they made a striking pair, and looked more like sisters than mother and daughter.

Tallie’s only other foray into marriage had been with an actor in one of her films. She never got involved with actors on the set of her movies, but had made an exception for him. He had been a major heartthrob, a big British star, and had swept her off her feet. She was thirty and he was twenty-eight, and he had cheated on her very publicly six months later when he was on location on another film. The marriage had lasted eleven months, they only spent three months of it together, and it had cost her a million dollars when she wanted out. He drove a hard bargain, and she paid the price.